‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli and Dawn Sterner.
As any connoisseur of true crime mysteries knows, a cold case is an unsolved criminal investigation, typically involving a violent crime like murder or a missing person, that is no longer actively pursued by authorities due to a lack of evidence or leads.
Unfortunately, the biggest cold case in New Canaan history has remained unsolved for 57 years.
On May 27, 1969, 10-year-old Mary Katherine Mount was abducted from Kiwanis Park in broad daylight. She and her 12-year-old brother had walked there in the afternoon from their house on Willowbrook Road; the brother last saw his pink-clad sister alone in the park, where she was playing with a cat. Authorities initiated a frantic, massive search for the young girl in New Canaan, including a number of local volunteers, as her parents Dr. and Mrs. Joseph F. Mount awaited a possible call for ransom, a call that tragically never came.
On June 17th, Mary’s body was discovered in deserted woods bordering Old Huckleberry Hill Road along the South Norwalk Reservoir in Wilton. She was found by two teenagers who had gone fishing. The next day New Canaan Chief of Police Henry E. Keller announced that her identification was made by dental records. Dr. Thomas P. Cody, New Canaan’s Medical Examiner, who was present during the four-hour autopsy at Norwalk Hospital, stated that Mary “apparently died as a result of the blow over the head with a blunt object,” reported the New York Times in its June 29, 1969 edition.
A sandpile at Kiwanis Park, present-day. Credit: Nick Williams
By late afternoon, however, “no murder weapon had been uncovered as scores of policemen combed the remote area of pine trees and skunk cabbage along the South Norwalk reservoir here, six miles from where the girl disappeared.”
Mary’s father, who was a data processing manager for IBM, released a simple yet heartbreaking statement the next day: “We have just received definitive word that our precious daughter, Mary, is dead,” it began. The statement concluded: “Today we accept the Lord’s will in the case of Mary’s life on earth. The Lord gave. The Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the Name of the Lord.”
Shortly after Mary was found, a group identified only as “concerned citizens of New Canaan” posted a $50,000 reward offered for information “leading to the apprehension of the murderer, reported The New Canaan Advertiser on July 17th. Despite a bevy of tips from citizens and at least one extension of the deadline for receipt of such information, nothing came of it.
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Incredibly, the murder of Mary Mount was just another in a string of violent child killings in southern Connecticut beginning that year. In short order:
On May 18, 1969, nine days before Mary Mount’s abduction, 11-year-old Diane Toney, dressed in a green polka-dot dress, disappeared from the Hill neighborhood of New Haven while attending the annual Freddy Fixer parade with her family. Her mother reported her missing after she failed to return home that day, and police and volunteers searched area streets and nearby wooded land. Diane’s remains were eventually found in Meshomasic State Forest in Guilford, 15 miles east of New Haven, on September 13, 1969. Authorities determined her death was a homicide; she had been bludgeoned with a rock.
On May 29, 1969, two days after Mary’s disappearance, fourteen-year-old Dawn Cave disappeared from her Bethany home after storming out following an argument with a sibling. Search efforts by local police and volunteers began immediately but turned up few leads. One month later, a young girl searching for her horse discovered Dawn’s body at the edge of a hayfield not far from her hometown. Authorities determined that Dawn’s skull was fractured by blunt force trauma consistent with a rock.
Finally, on September 29, 1970, five-year-old New Haven girl Jennifer Noon disappeared while walking the short distance from school to home for lunch. Local police and volunteers quickly organized searches of nearby streets, parks, and wooded areas after she failed to arrive home. Her body was discovered eight days later in a wooded section of Hamden, where investigators believed she was beaten to death in an-all-too familiar modus operandi – blunt force trauma from a rock.
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While all the deaths remain unsolved, there is one individual that has long been suspected as the killer of Mary Mount, as well as the three other girls.
Born in 1948, Harold Meade was the son of a gas station owner in Bethany, Connecticut. He worked as a tow truck driver, milkman, and mobile ice cream vendor. On August 12, 1970, at the age of 22, Meade slaughtered three residents of the Greater New Haven Regional Center, which provided housing and services for intellectually disabled individuals. The trio, who were on their way to a supervised activity in that city’s West Rock Park, included Sandra Hedler (15), Donna Schlitter (23), and William White (20). He bludgeoned all of them with rocks and left their bodies in a wooded area.
Meade pleaded guilty to the three murders and, in one of the more regrettable plea agreements in Connecticut history, prosecutors agreed to forego charging him with any crimes he might have committed beyond the triple homicide. Any crimes. Even though four young girls had been horrifically murdered before – and in a manner entirely consistent with – the violence that led to the plea agreement in the first place.
On April 11, 1972, Judge Kenneth J. Zarrilli of the New Haven Superior Court sentenced Meade to three concurrent life terms in prison, emphasizing his extraordinary inhumanity: “It’s difficult to conceive of a more senseless and horrendous series of crimes . . . . He should be kept in a structured environment for the rest of his life and not be granted parole or pardon.”
Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.
Meade was incarcerated at the Connecticut State Prison in Somers, where he earned a reputation as a model prisoner, receiving commendations for his “work ethic, including roles in outdoor maintenance and as a prison photographer”, and earning him participation in the Department of Correction’s furlough program for prisoners. Indeed, from 1985 to 1992 he received 184 one-day furloughs and 68 three-day weekend passes, allowing him unescorted time outside prison for family visits.
It was on one of those furloughs that Meade got married, and on two others that he fathered two children. Another furlough occurred on the weekend of June 26–27, 1992, when he and his wife stayed at a cabin a short drive from Hammonasset Beach State Park in Madison, Connecticut celebrating their second anniversary.
There was no such celebration for a woman named Linda Rayner however. That same weekend the 43-year-old mother was killed while walking alone on Hammonasset Beach during the afternoon. The attack involved repeated blows to the head with a rock or similar blunt object, crushing her skull. Her body was found the next day, with most evidence being washed away by the incoming tide.
Although Harold Meade was never charged with the murder of Linda Rayner, he also never received another furlough; his privileges were revoked within two months of Rayner’s death. Meade himself died in prison on December 9, 2007, at age 66.
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Was Meade responsible for the murders of Mary Mount, Diane Toney, Dawn Cave, Jennifer Noon, and Linda Rayner? We may never know for sure, but there are certainly compelling reasons to think that he was:
- The gas station in Bethel owned by Meade’s father was approximately two miles from the location where Dawn Cave’s body was found.
- An eyewitness who lived near that location claimed she saw a man matching Meade’s description forcefully take a girl behind a stone wall, later emerging alone and driving away.
- The Hartford Courant reported in 2000 that a New Haven detective who was investigating the West Rock Park murders stated that one of Meade’s routes as a milkman went through the Kiwanis neighborhood where Mary Mount lived.
- During one of his interrogations Meade was reportedly asked whether he killed Mount and he replied that he couldn’t remember.
- A witness claimed to have seen Jennifer Noon get into a car with a man who resembled Meade.
- A fellow inmate claimed that Meade admitted that he left his cabin to buy a pack of cigarettes and decided to smoke them at Hammonasset Beach State Park. When he saw Rayner there, he attacked her.
New Canaan’s Mary Mount is buried in Lakeview Cemetery, less than a mile from where she was last seen alive.
I was 7 and remember this vividly. My parents where terrified, and so was I. I have thought about this case over the years, and did not realize that was ever a suspect and what he later, it seems, likely, did. What this article describes is hard to fathom as the author says. To this day, it is still horrific to contemplate the depravity the befell Southern CT all those years ago.
Thank you for this article. I would like to suggest a book written about this case in 2009 “The Wind Cries Mary: Murders That Shook A Power Town” by a local resident Erika Grey [a pen name].
The book details the Mary Mount case and the John Rice case.
An excerpt from Amazon:
Erika Grey is a skilled researcher, non fiction writer, author of children’s works, and artist. In The Wind Cries Mary: Murders That Shook A Power Town, Erika tells the true crime story of the unsolved murder of Mary Mount and the (John) Rice family murders that occurred one and a half blocks from her home. Her father was an auxiliary police officer at the time, and her siblings and friends went to school with Mary Mount and the Rice family members who were murdered.
“Erika Grey” has been following up with other research. She got the police files that were unavailabe to her when she first wrote that book. She may want to comment on that.
Thanks, Tom, for that update.
If the New Canaan or Wilton Police still have evidence from that “unsolved” crime, perhaps the latest advances in identifying DNA left from the killer may finally put the case to rest.
It would be interesting to read a comment from Donna Tarzia.
The files, pictures, etc. show extreme violence, horrific and monstrous.
Does this mean that John Rice is no longer a suspect in Mary Mount’s murder?The book The Wind Cries Mary if you are not familiar with it.
I remember this story like it was yesterday as an 11-year-old living in town. No Internet or social media back then, bad news traveled like wildfire. The only source of news was the Advertiser and the 3 New York
major networks. It was certainly unnerving for everyone in town for weeks.
M. DiPanni Jr.